


that damn quarter

by themidsummersoldier



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Gen, it's the classic honey i shrunk the kids trope, what's not to love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-26
Updated: 2015-02-26
Packaged: 2018-03-15 08:59:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3441242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themidsummersoldier/pseuds/themidsummersoldier
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>/// so with a mob of angry knitting needle wielding grandmothers on their heels, skye had decided it was better to simply rip the hands off of the skeleton and run ///   in which skye and mack play cards, fight fitz for a ruler, and take selfies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	that damn quarter

**Author's Note:**

> originally published on tumblr 10-14-14. based on the following anon prompt- "A captured 0-8-4 turns out to be a shrink ray. Which team member 'accidentally' gets zapped first and what do they do?" 
> 
> written during a time when jemma simmons was undercover at hydra, tv!bobbi morse was just some promotional stills and grant ward was still in the basement. oh, and, of course, trip was alive. enjoy.

-

"You got any…  _sevens_?”

A long pause.

"Go fish," came Mack’s low voice, followed by a smirk.

Skye rolled her eyes.

“Why are you so good at this game?” she asked, leaning forward to grab a card off of the stack.

"Experience," Mack stated matter-of-factly, reorganizing the cards in his hands, "Three nieces and two nephews will get you plenty of practice at Go Fish."

A lab assistant in a pristine white coat rushed by the table Mack and Skye were playing on, head buried in a manila folder. The wind from said lab coat blew several playing cards off of the draw pile, and the queen of spades plotted a direct course for Skye’s face. The impact knocked her backwards from her criss-cross applesauce position flat onto her back, where the air promptly left her lungs in a “whoomph.”

"T-this is  _ridiculous_ ,” she complained, as she caught her breath and peeled her self off of the table top. Frustrated, she shoved her cards away from her.

“ _Shield agent killed by a flying playing card_ ,” Mack boomed, with an impressive imitation of a news reporter reading the evenings headlines.

"Ha _ha_ ,” Skye muttered sarcastically, standing up and brushing off her leather jacket. After a moment of hesitation to let the world stop spinning, she walked over to where her glass of water was sitting. Craning her neck, she managed to get the straw towards her mouth (a very impressive feat, she would add) and get a drop or two out.

"You do realize this is all your fault to begin with," Mack pointed out, not in an accusing tone, but in the type of voice a teacher would use when telling a student that it was the their own dumb fault for not studying when they failed a test.

"I’m  _pretty_  sure this is at least fifty percent your fault, too,” Skye reminded him, wiping her mouth on her sleeve, “If you hadn’t pushed me-“

"I was trying to  _stop you_  from touching The Damn Quarter,” Mack interrupted.

"Yeah, well, maybe judge your strength a little better next time. You knocked me right on top of The Damn Quarter. And _for the record_ , I wasn’t going to touch it,” Skye gave Mack a glare, “I learned my lesson with the last 0-8-4. The one that turned people to stone?”

 _For the record_ , it wasn’t that crazy of an idea to want to touch The Damn Quarter. It seemed harmless enough, a piece of metal the size and shape of, well,  _a quarter_ , and engraved with strange markings. Coulson had initially hoped it would give them a clue to the whole “Garrett writing on the walls” thing, but the writing was completely different. That’s not to say the discovery was completely  _useless_ , however. The Damn Quarter put on a fairly spectacular light show when in contact with organic matter. Plus it-

Mack’s sigh broke into Skye’s thoughts and she watched as he laid his cards in a neat pile and came over to join her, stretching his arms above his head as he did so.

"You gotta admit it’s pretty funny," he remarked, rubbing the five o’clock shadow on his face, "You’re usually the shortest person here, I’m usually the tallest, and now neither of us can even reach the toilet by ourselves."

Skye shuddered at the memory, and decided she had had enough water for now. No way was she going through that embarrassment again. Pushing the memory aside, she looked at Mack coyly.

"I have to say, it  _is_  pretty neat to be the same height as you,” she said as she walked in a circle around the (formerly) taller man, “I think this may be the first time I’ve ever seen the top of your head.”

"I’m still taller than you," Mack pointed out, then held his hands up in surrender as she gave him a look, "Just a fact. They said we shrunk at the same rate, so you’re still proportionally shorter."

Skye’s face took on a thoughtful look as she considered a container full of assorted rulers across the table they were standing on. It didn’t take a genius to see what her next move was. “Guess we’ll see,” she called in a sing-song voice as she took off at a sprint.

A regular sized table is kind of like a football field when you’re the size of a Barbie Doll. Scratch that,  _smaller_  than Barbie. More like, Barbie’s annoying teenage sister. And unfortunately that’s about the size that one Alphonso Mackenzie and one Agent Skye had ended up as. It was supposed to have been a simple assignment- take the Bus to some ancient church thingy in Italy, grab the 0-8-4 (not literally, duh) and go. When Skye, Mack, and May finally found the 0-8-4, however, it was stuck tightly in the hands a beautifully preserved skeleton ( _of course)_. So with a mob of angry knitting needle wielding grandmothers on their heels, Skye had decided it was better to simply rip the hands off of the skeleton and run. While Skye had been reaching for the hands, Mack had mistakenly assumed Skye was about to pick up the 0-8-4 and had attempted to push her away. Thus, through  _that_  series of unfortunate events, they had both come crashing down onto the skeleton, causing it to crumble to dust, and therefore coming in contact with the 0-8-4. The next thing Skye knew, the ceiling had looked like a cheesy 70’s disco montage, and she and Mack found themselves on the same level as the rats that roamed the floor of the church. That was The Damn Quarter’s mysterious power after all, which is why The Damn Quarter was currently under some sort of stasis field in the lab, while every scientist in the bunker ran around trying to figure out what to do next. 

Skye, on the other hand, knew exactly what she was running for. She slowed to a halt in front of a metal cup filled with half a dozen rulers, each slightly different than the next. Standing on her toes, she began to wiggle one of the plastic ones out of its place. Mack was a few feet away, walking towards her, shaking his head but smiling, when a large hand came down out of nowhere and yanked the rulers away from Skye’s reach.

"Don’t. Touch.  _Anything_ ,” came an annoyed Scottish voice from above Skye’s head, in a tone that said, “I’ve told you this at least a dozen times now.” (which, to be honest, was probably an underestimate at this point.) Fitz’s voice sounded like it was coming from a megaphone, but without any of the distortion. While the medical lab assistants continued to chart the biological changes that were occurring in Skye and Mack, Fitz and his team were attempting to figure out how The Damn Quarter worked. And, more importantly, if the effects could be reversed. Skye frowned up at him.

“ _Still_  don’t understand why we can’t touch anything,” she sighed in a fake-exasperated tone.

“ _Because_ ,” Fitz began to explain again, “we don’t understand how the uh- The Damn Quarter transfers… _energy_  and if it uh…” Fitz’s voice trailed off as he turned on his heel, and Skye couldn’t tell if he was distracted by something on the monitor in front of him, or if he couldn’t remember the words he needed. After thirty seconds of silence, he seemed to remember that he never finished his sentence. “Well, you already know all this,” he finally complained, “I’ve only told you what?  _Thirty times_?”

Okay, now Skye felt bad. Fitz was trying to help them and she just kept pushing the limits of how far her disobedience could go.

"Sorry, Fitz," she called, giving him her best apologetic smile. He continued to show her a disapproving face, but dipped his shoulders in acknowledgment. Of course, being Skye, she couldn’t just let the matter go without  _some_  sort of conclusive answer.

 ”We were just  _curious_  how tall we are…” she continued offhandedly.

Fitz threw a hand up and muttered something along the lines of “for the love of-” Walking away, head bent down towards the papers in his hand, he mumbled, “Skye, you’re 22.61 centimeters, Mack you’re 27.98. Now  _shush_.”

"In regular people words!" Skye yelled after him, and she just barely caught the few choice four letter words that followed.

"That would be about eight and a half inches and eleven inches," Mack supplied. Skye gave him a sarcastic "thanks."

"Really, it’s the metric system that would be considered "regular people words", since there are only-"

Skye never got to hear the rest of Mack’s explanation, because at that moment someone of importance walked into the lab, as made evident by the several scientist who had been sitting drinking coffee just moments before suddenly snapping to attention and rushing around trying to look productive. Skye and Mack’s ‘hello sir”s ran into each other as Director Phil Coulson came over to peer down at them. The curious look on Coulson’s face was somewhere between- “oh my god my daughter is only eight inches tall this is terrible!” and “oh my god my daughter is only eight inches tall this is incredible!” He had been showing up at periodic intervals ever since Skye and Mack had had their little incident, almost two hours ago. Trip had visited once, to offer some words of encouragement (and to drop off the playing cards.) When Lance had come down to see them, he had taken one look and left before he could burst out laughing. A few minutes later he had poked his head in the doorway, his face still red, as if to confirm that he had really seen what he thought he had seen. His choked laughter had echoed off the walls as Skye attempted to reprimand him. She hadn’t seen May since her S.O. had,  _quite literally_ , carried Skye and Mack into the lab. Shame, maybe May could have whipped Lance into showing some respect. Skye had no idea whether or not Ward knew about the situation, and she wasn’t sure if she cared.

"Anything?" Coulson asked Fitz, unable to tear his eyes away from Skye and Mack.

Fitz shrugged, shook his head and mumbled, “No.”

"This goes on too much longer, you’re going to have to redesign this place," Mack said, in an effort to lighten the mood, "Get some dollhouse furniture-" he broke off and pointed at Skye, "hey, maybe a Barbie Dream House?" 

Skye couldn’t help but smile. ”You have a mini Bus in your office, don’t you?” she asked Coulson, playing along with the whole idea. She quickly wished she hadn’t. Coulson’s eyes immediately went wide, as though he were imagining the possibilities. _Real live people to go with his fully functional Mini Bus?_ His jaw dropped a little.

"Let me know if you come up with anything, okay Fitz?" Coulson asked, almost as if he were in a daze. Skye swore, if Coulson tried to make her live in the Mini Bus, she was going to-

'Yeah, I'll uh- uh- let you know,” FItz answered, after a brief pause as he tried to evaluate the director's mental state. Coulson backed out of the lab, slowly, his eyes seeming to take in Skye's and Mack's measurements, as if still trying to decide whether or not they would fit in his Bus. 

"Come on," Mack nodded back towards the middle of the table, where cards were haphazardly lying about, "Let’s finish this game. Keep our minds off of all this." Skye conceded, crossing her arms and walking slowly back to the cards. She made a quick detour, however, to grab her phone.

"You know what’s really dumb?" she asked, unlocking her phone with some difficulty.

"Those people who tried microwaving the iphone six?" Mack offered. 

"Well  _yes_ , but  _no.”_

Mack shrugged.

"Why did everything on us shrink, you know, our clothes, our shoes, but not our phones?" Skye asked, as she attempted to prop the aforementioned object against a stack of binders. Mack didn’t offer any answers. She had heard of people complaining that smartphones were getting too big, but this was ridiculous. Her phone came up to her chest. Bringing up her camera, she considered herself in what was practically a full length mirror. It was so strange, she  _looked_ just like her normal self. If it wasn’t for all the regular sized things in the background, she could almost convince herself that nothing had changed. Stretching her arm as far as she could, she managed to take a half way decent selfie. Mack snorted. 

"It’s your turn," he reminded her, gesturing to the cards across from him.

Skye made a noise that said “I’m coming, I’m coming,” and quickly tapped a few things on her phone. Shutting it off, she sat down across from Mack and managed to get her cards back into some sort of order.

"You got any…  _sevens_?” she asked.

"That’s what you asked for last time!" Mack protested.

"Doesn’t matter," Skye replied, "You got any or not?"

Grudgingly, Mack handed over his seven. The game continued in relative silence, punctuated only by regular- “do you have any..?”s and- “go fish”s. After what must have been two or three minutes, Skye heard a sound like footsteps pounding down the hall outside of the lab. Seconds later, Coulson appeared in the doorway, looking as though he had run full speed from his office. His eyes locked with Skye’s. She couldn’t even pinpoint the emotion in Coulson’s voice. It was something like dumb-founded scandalous shock, if such a thing even existed. 

"You  _instagrammed_  a  _selfie_? At a time like  _this_?”

_end._


End file.
